Robert Elsmere by Mrs. Humphry Ward (page 4)

For the drawing-room she avows a passionate preference for one all cabbage-roses and no stalks; but she admits that it may be exasperation. She wants your sister, clearly, to advise her. By the way,’ and his voice changed, ‘the vicar told me last night that Miss Rose is going to Manchester for the winter to study. He heard it from Miss Agnes, I think. The news interested me greatly after our conversation.’

He looked at her with the most winning interrogative eyes. His whole manner implied that everything which touched and concerned her touched and concerned him; and, moreover, that she had given him in some sort a right to share her thoughts and difficulties. Catherine struggled with herself.

‘I trust it may answer,’ she said, in a low voice.

But she would say no more, and he felt rebuffed. His buoyancy began to desert him.

‘It must be a great trial to Mrs. Elsmere,’ she said presently with an effort, once more steering away from herself and her concerns, ‘this going back to her old home.’

‘It is. My father’s long struggle for life in that house is a very painful memory. I wished her to put it off till I could go with her, but she declared she would rather get over the first week or two by herself. How I should like you to know my mother, Miss Leyburn!

At this she could not help meeting his glance and smile, and answering them, though with a kind of constraint most unlike her.

‘I hope I may some day see Mrs. Elsmere,’ she said.

‘It is one of my strongest wishes,’ he answered, hurriedly, ‘to bring you together.’

The words were simple enough; the tone was full of emotion. He was fast losing control of himself. She felt it through every nerve, and a sort of wild dread seized her of what he might say next. Oh, she must prevent it!

‘Your mother was with you most of your Oxford life, was she not?’ she said, forcing herself to speak in her most everyday tones.

He controlled himself with a mighty effort.

‘Since I became a Fellow. We have been alone in the world so long. We have never been able to do without each other.’

‘Isn’t it wonderful to you?’ said Catherine, after a little electric pause–and her voice was steadier and clearer than it had been since the beginning of their conversation–‘how little the majority of sons and daughters regard their parents when they come to grow up and want to live their own lives? The one thought seems to be to get rid of them, to throw off their claims, to cut them adrift, to escape them–decently, of course, and under many pretexts, but still to escape them. All the long years of devotion and self-sacrifice go for nothing.’

He looked at her quickly–a troubled, questioning look.

‘It is so, often; but not, I think, where the parents have truly understood their problem. The real difficulty for father and mother is not childhood, but youth; how to get over that difficult time when the child passes into the man or woman, and a relation of governor and governed should become the purest and closest of friendships. You and I have been lucky.’

‘Yes,’ she said, looking straight before her, and still speaking with a distinctness which caught his ear painfully, ‘and so are the greater debtors! There is no excuse, I think, for any child, least of all for the child who has had years of understanding love to look back upon, if it puts its own claim first; if it insists on satisfying itself, when there is age and weakness appealing to it on the other side, when it is still urgently needed to help those older, to shield those younger, than itself. Its business first of all is to pay its debt, whatever the cost.’

The voice was low, but it had the clear, vibrating ring of steel. Robert’s face had darkened visibly.

‘But, surely,’ he cried, goaded by a now stinging sense of revolt and pain-‘surely the child may make a fatal mistake if it imagines that its own happiness counts for nothing in the parents’ eyes. What parent but must suffer from the starving of the child’s nature? What have mother and father been working for, after all, but the perfecting of the child’s life? Their longing is that it should fulfil itself in all directions. New ties, new affections, on the child’s part mean the enriching of the parent. What a cruel fate for the elder generation, to make it the jailer and burden of the younger!’

He spoke with heat and anger, with a sense of dashing himself against an obstacle, and a dumb despairing certainty, rising at the heart of him.

‘Ah, that is what we are so ready to say,’ she answered, her breath coming more quickly, and her eye meeting his with a kind of antagonism in it; ‘but it is all sophistry. The only safety lies in following out the plain duty. The parent wants the child’s help and care, the child is bound to give it; that is all it needs to know. If it forms new ties, it belongs to them, not to the old ones; the old ones must come to be forgotten and put aside’

‘So you would make all life a sacrifice to the past?’ he cried, quivering under the blow she was dealing him.

‘No, not all life,’ she said, struggling hard to preserve her perfect calm of manner: he could not know that she was trembling from head to foot. ‘There are many for whom it is easy and right to choose their own way; their happiness robs no one. There are others on whom a charge has been laid from their childhood a charge perhaps–and her voice faltered at last–‘impressed on them by dying lips, which must govern, possess their lives; which it would be baseness, treason, to betray. We are not here only to be happy.’

And she turned to him deadly pale, the faintest, sweetest smile on her lip. He was for the moment incapable of speech. He began phrase after phrase, and broke them off. A whirlwind of feeling possessed him. The strangeness, the unworldliness of what she had done struck him singularly. He realized through every nerve that what she had just said to him she had been bracing herself to say to him ever since their last parting. And now he could not tell, or, rather, blindly could not see, whether she suffered in the saying it. A passionate protest rose in him, not so much against her words as against her self-control. The man in him rose up against the woman’s unlooked-for, unwelcome strength.

But as the hot words she had dared so much in her simplicity to avert from them both were bursting from him, they were checked by a sudden physical difficulty. A bit of road was under water. A little beck, swollen by the rain, had overflowed, and for a few yards distance the water stood about eight inches deep from hedge to hedge. Robert had splashed through the flood half an hour before, but it had risen rapidly since then. He had to apply his mind to the practical task of finding a way to the other side.

‘You must climb the bank,’ he said, ‘and get through into the field.’

She assented mutely. He went first, drew her up the bank, forced his way through the loosely growing hedge himself, and holding back some young hazel saplings and breaking others, made an opening for her through which she scrambled with bent head; then, stretching out his hand to her, he made her submit to be helped down the steep bank on the other side. Her straight young figure was just above him, her breath almost on his cheek.

‘You talk of baseness and treason,’ he began, passionately, conscious of a hundred wild impulses, as perforce she leant her light weight upon his arm.

‘Life is not so simple. It is so easy to sacrifice others with one’s self, to slay all claims in honor of one, instead of knitting the new ones to the old. Is life to be allowed no natural expansion? Have you forgotten that, in refusing the new bond for the old bond’s sake, the child may be simply wronging the parents, depriving them of another affection, another support, which ought to have been theirs?’

His tone was harsh, almost violent. It seemed to him that she grew suddenly white, and he grasped her more firmly still. She reached the level of the field, quickly withdrew her hand, and for a moment their eyes met, her pale face raised to his. It seemed an age, so much was said in that look. There was appeal on her side, passion on his. Plainly she implored him to say no more, to spare her and himself.

‘In some cases,’ she said, and her voice sounded strained and hoarse to both of them, ‘one cannot risk the old bond. On dare not trust one’s self–or circumstance. The responsibility is too great; one can but follow the beaten path, cling to the one thread. But don’t let us talk of it anymore. We must make for that gate, Mr. Elsmere. It will bring us out on the road again close by home.’

He was quelled. Speech suddenly became impossible to him. He was struck again with that sense of a will firmer and more tenacious than his own, which had visited him in a slight passing way on the first evening they ever met, and now filled him with a kind of despair. As they pushed silently along the edge of the dripping meadow, he noticed with a pang that the stepping-stones lay just below them. The gleam of sun had died away, the aerial valley in the clouds had vanished, and a fresh storm of rain brought back the color to Catherine’s cheek. On their left hand was the roaring of the river, on their right they could already hear the wind moaning and tearing through the trees which sheltered Burwood. The nature which an hour ago had seemed to him so full of stimulus and exhilaration, had taken to itself a note of gloom and mourning; for he was at the age when Nature is the mere docile responsive mirror of the spirit, when all her forces and powers are made for us, and are only there to play chorus to our story.

They reached the little lane leading to the gate of Burwood. She paused at the foot of it.

‘You will come in and see my mother, Mr. Elsmere?’

Her look expressed a yearning she could not crush. ‘Your pardon, your friendship,’ it cried, with the usual futility of all good women under the circumstances. But as he met it for one passionate instant, he recognized fully that there was not a trace of yielding in it. At the bottom of the softness there was the iron of resolution.

‘No, no; not now,’ he said involuntarily; and she never forgot the painful struggle of the face; ‘good-by.’ He touched her hand without another word, and was gone.

She toiled up to the gate with difficulty; the gray rain-washed road, the wall, the trees, swimming before her eyes.

In the hall she came across Agnes, who caught hold of her with a start.

‘My dear Cathie! you have been walking yourself to death. You look like a ghost. Come and have some tea at once.’

And she dragged her into the drawing-room. Catherine submitted with all her usual outward calm, faintly smiling at her sister’s onslaught. But she would not let Agnes put her down on the sofa. She stood with her hand on the back of a chair.

‘The weather is very close and exhausting,’ she said, gently lifting her hand to her hat. But the hand dropped, and she sank heavily into the chair.

‘Cathie, you are faint,’ cried Agnes, running to her.

Catherine waved her away, and, with an effort of which none but she would have been capable, mastered the physical weakness.

‘I have been a long way, dear,’ she said, as though in apology, ‘and there is no air. Yes, I will go up-stairs and lie down a minute or two. ‘Oh no, don’t come, I will be down for tea directly.’

And refusing all help, she guided herself out of the room, her face the color of the foam on the beck outside. Agnes stood dumfounded. Never in her life before had she seen Catherine betray any such signs of physical exhaustion.

Suddenly Rose ran in, shut the door carefully behind her, and rushing up to Agnes put her hands on her shoulders.

‘He has proposed to her, and she has said no!’

‘He? What, Mr. Elsmere? How on earth can you know?’

‘I saw them from up-stairs come to the bottom of the lane. Then he rushed on, and I have just met her on the stairs. It’s as plain as the nose on your face.’

Agnes sat down bewildered.

‘It is hard on him’ she said at last.

‘Yes, it is _very_ hard on him!’ cried Rose, pacing the room, her long thin arms clasped behind her, her eyes flashing, ‘for she loves him!’

‘Rose!’

‘She does, my dear, she does,’ cried the girl, frowning. I know it in a hundred ways.’

Agnes ruminated.

‘And it’s all because of us?’ she said at last reflectively.

‘Of course! I put it to you, Agnes’–and Rose stood still with a tragic air–‘I put it to you, whether it isn’t too bad that three unoffending women should have such a role as this assigned them against their will!’

The eloquence of eighteen was irresistible. Agnes buried her head in the sofa cushion, and shook with a kind of helpless laughter. Rose meanwhile stood in the window, her thin form drawing up to its full height, angry with Agnes, and enraged with all the world.

‘It’s absurd, it’s insulting,’ she exclaimed. ‘I should imagine that you and I Agnes, were old enough and sane enough to look after mamma, put out the stores, say our prayers, and prevent each other from running away with adventurers! I won’t be always in leading-strings. I won’t acknowledge that Catherine is bound to be an old maid to keep me in order. I hate it! It is sacrifice run mad.’

And Rose turned to her sister, the defiant head thrown back, a passion of manifold protest in the girlish looks.

‘It is very easy, my dear, to be judge in one’s own case,’ replied Agnes calmly, recovering herself. ‘Suppose you tell Catherine some of these home-truths?’

Rose collapsed at once. She sat down despondently, and fell, head drooping, into a moody silence, Agnes watched her with a kind of triumph. When it came to the point, she knew perfectly well that there was not a will among them that could measure itself with any chance of success against that lofty, but unwavering will of Catherine’s. Rose was violent, and there was much reason in her violence. But as for her, she preferred not to dash her head against stone walls.

‘Well, then, if you won’t say them to Catherine, say them to mamma,’ she suggested presently, but half ironically.

‘Mamma is no good,’ cried Rose angrily; ‘why do you bring her in? Catherine would talk her round in ten minutes.’

Long after everyone else in Burwood, even the chafing, excited Rose, was asleep, Catherine in her dimly lighted room, where the stormy northwest wind beat noisily against her window, was sitting in a low chair, her head leaning against her bed, her little well-worn Testament open on her knee. But she was not reading. Her eyes were shut; one hand hung down beside her, and tears were raining fast and silently over her cheeks. It was the stillest, most restrained weeping. She hardly knew why she wept, she only knew that there was something within her which must have its way. What did this inner smart and tumult mean, this rebellion of the self against the will which had never yet found its mastery fail it? It was as though from her childhood till now she had lived in a moral world whereof the aims, the dangers, the joys, were all she knew; and now the walls of this world were crumbling round her, and strange lights, strange voices, strange colors were breaking through. All the sayings of Christ which had lain closest to her heart for years, tonight for the first time seem to her no longer sayings of comfort or command, but sayings of fire and flame that burn their coercing way through life and thought. We recite so glibly, ‘He that loseth his life shall save it;’ and when we come to any of the common crises of experience which are the source and the sanction of the words, flesh and blood recoil. This girl amid her mountains had carried religion as far as religion can be carried before it meets life in the wrestle appointed it. The calm, simple outlines of things are blurring before her eyes; the great placid deeps of the soul are breaking up.

To the purest ascetic temper a struggle of this kind is hardly real. Catherine felt a bitter surprise at her own pain. Yesterday a sort of mystical exaltation upheld her. What had broken it down?

Simply a pair of reproachful eyes, a pale protesting face. What trifles compared to the awful necessities of an infinite obedience! And yet they haunt her, till her heart aches for misery, till she only yearns to be counselled, to be forgiven, to be at least understood.

‘Why, why am I so weak?’ she cried in utter abasement of soul, and knew not that in that weakness, or rather in the founts of character from which it sprang, lay the innermost safeguard of her life.

CHAPTER IX.

Robert was very nearly reduced to despair by the scene with Catherine we have described. He spent a brooding and miserable hour in the vicar’s study afterward, making up his mind as to what he should do. One phrase of hers which had passed almost unnoticed in the shock of the moment was now ringing in his ears, maddening him by a sense of joy just within his reach, and yet barred away from him by an obstacle as strong as it was intangible. ‘_We are not here only to be happy_,’ she had said to him, with a look of ethereal exaltation worthy of her namesake of Alexandria. The words had slipped from her involuntarily in the spiritual tension of her mood. They were now filling Robert Elsmere’s mind with a tormenting, torturing bliss. What could they mean? What had her paleness, her evident trouble and weakness meant, but that the inmost self of hers was his, was conquered; and that, but for the shadowy obstacle between them, all would be well?

As for the obstacle in itself, he did not admit its force for a moment. No sane and practical man, least of all when that man happened to be Catherine Leyburn’s lover, could regard it as a binding obligation upon her that she should sacrifice her own life and happiness to three persons, who were in no evident moral straits, no physical or pecuniary need, and who, as Rose incoherently put it, might very well be rather braced than injured by the withdrawal of her strong support.

But the obstacle of character–ah, there was a different matter! He realized with despair the brooding, scrupulous force of moral passion to which her lonely life, her antecedents, and her father’s nature working in her had given so rare and marked a development. No temper in the world is so little open to reason as the ascetic temper. How many a lover and husband, how many a parent and friend, have realized to their pain, since history began, the overwhelming attraction which all the processes of self-annihilation have for a certain order of minds! Robert’s heart sank before the memory of that frail, indomitable look, that aspect of sad yet immovable conviction with which she had bade him farewell. And yet, surely–surely under the willingness of the spirit there had been a pitiful, a most womanly weakness of the flesh. Surely, now memory reproduced the scene, she had been white–trembling: her hand had rested on the moss-grown wall beside her for support. Oh, why had he been so timid? why had he let that awe of her, which her personality produced so readily, stand between them? why had he not boldly caught her to himself and, with all the eloquence of a passionate nature, trampled on her scruples, marched through her doubts, convinced–reasoned her into a blessed submission?

‘And I will do it yet!’ he cried, leaping to his feet with a sudden access of hope and energy. And he stood awhile looking out into the rainy evening, all the keen, irregular face, and thin, pliant form hardening into the intensity of resolve, which had so often carried the young tutor through an Oxford difficulty, breaking, down antagonism and compelling consent.

At the high tea which represented the late dinner of the household he was wary and self-possessed. Mrs. Thornburgh got out of him that he had been for a walk, and had seen Catherine, but for all her ingenuities of cross-examination she got nothing more. Afterward, when he and the vicar were smoking together, he proposed to Mr. Thornburgh that they two should go off for a couple of days on a walking tour to Ullswater.

‘I want to go away,’ he said, with a hand on the vicar’s shoulder, ‘_and I want to come back_.’ The deliberation of the 1ast words was not to be mistaken. The vicar emitted a contented puff, looked the young man straight in the eyes, and without another word began to plan a walk to Patterdale via High Street, Martindale, and Howtown, and back by Hawes-water.

To Mrs. Thornburgh, Robert announced that he must leave them on the following Saturday, June 24.

‘You have given me a good time, cousin Emma,’ he said to her, with a bright friendliness which dumfounded her. A good time, indeed! with everything begun and nothing finished: with two households thrown into perturbation for a delusion, and a desirable marriage spoilt, all for want of a little common sense and plain speaking, which _one_ person at least in the valley could have supplied them with, had she not been ignored and browbeaten on all sides. She contained herself, however, in his presence, but the vicar suffered proportionately in the privacy of the connubial chamber. He had never seen his wife so exasperated. To think what might have been–what she might have done for the race, but for the whims of two stuck-up, superior, impracticable young persons, that would neither manage their own affairs nor allow other people to manage them for them! The vicar behaved gallantly, kept the secret of Elsmere’s remark to himself like a man, and allowed himself certain counsels against matrimonial meddling which plunged Mrs. Thornburgh into well-simulated slumber. However, in the morning he was vaguely conscious that some time in the visions of the night his spouse had demanded of him peremptorily, ‘When do you get back, William?’ To the best of his memory, the vicar had sleepily murmured, ‘Thursday;’ and had then heard, echoed through his dreams, a calculating whisper, ‘He goes Saturday–one clear day!’

The ‘following morning was gloomy but fine, and after breakfast the vicar and Elsmere started off. Robert turned back at the top of the High Fell pass and stood leaning on his alpenstock, sending a passionate farewell to the gray distant house, the upper window, the copper beech in the garden, the bit of winding road, while the vicar discreetly stepped on northward, his eyes fixed on the wild regions of Martindale.

Mrs. Thornburgh, left alone, absorbed herself to all appearance in the school treat which was to come off in a fortnight, in a new set of covers for the drawing-room, and in Sarah’s love affairs, which were always passing through some traffic phase or other, and into which Mrs. Thornburgh was allowed a more unencumbered view than she was into Catherine Leyburn’s. Rose and Agnes dropped in now and then and found her not disposed to talk to them on the great event of the day, Elsmere’s absence and approaching departure. They cautiously communicated to her their own suspicions as to the incident of the preceding afternoon; and Rose gave vent to one fiery onslaught on the ‘moral obstacle’ theory, during which Mrs. Thornburgh sat studying her with small attentive eyes and curls slowly waving from side to side. But for once in her life the vicar’s wife was not communicative in return. That the situation should have driven even Mrs. Thornburgh to finesse was a surprising testimony to its gravity. What between her sudden taciturnity and Catherine’s pale silence, the girls’ sense of expectancy was roused to its highest pitch.

‘They come back to-morrow night,’ said Rose, thoughtfully, ‘and he goes Saturday–10.20 from Whinborough–one day for the Fifth Act! By the way, why did Mrs. Thornburgh ask us to say nothing about Saturday at home?’

She _had_ asked them, however; and with a pleasing sense of conspiracy they complied.

It was late on Thursday afternoon when Mrs. Thornburgh, finding the Burwood front door open, made her unchallenged way into the hall, and after an unanswered knock at the drawing-room door, opened it and peered in to see who might be there.

‘May I come in?’

Mrs. Leyburn, who was a trifle deaf, was sitting by the window absorbed in the intricacies of a heel which seemed to her more than she could manage. Her card was mislaid, the girls were none of them at hand, and she felt as helpless as she commonly did when left alone.

‘Oh, do come in, please! So glad to see you. Have you been nearly blown away?’

For, though the rain had stopped, a boisterous northwest wind was still rushing through the valley, and the trees round Burwood were swaying and groaning under the force of its onslaught.

‘Well, it is stormy,’ said Mrs. Thornburgh, stepping in and undoing all the various safety-pins and elastics which had held her dress high above the mud. ‘Are the girls out?’

‘Yes, Catherine and Agnes are at the school; and Rose, I think, is practising.’

‘Ah, well,’ said Mrs. Thornburgh, settling herself in a chair close by her friend, ‘I wanted to find you alone.’

Her face, framed in bushy curls and an old garden bonnet, was flushed and serious. Her mittened hands were clasped nervously on her lap, and there was about her such an air of forcibly restrained excitement, that Mrs. Leyburn’s mild eyes gazed at her with some astonishment. The two women were a curious contrast: Mrs. Thornburgh short, inclined, as we know, to be stout, ample and abounding in all things, whether it were curls or cap-strings or conversation; Mrs. Leyburn tall and well proportioned, well dressed, with the same graceful ways and languid pretty manners as had first attracted her husband’s attention thirty years before. She was fond of Mrs. Thornburgh, but there was something in the ebullient energies of the vicar’s wife which always gave her a sense of bustle and fatigue.

‘I am sure you will be sorry to hear,’ began her visitor, that Mr. Elsmere is going.’

‘Going?’ said Mrs. Leyburn, laying down her knitting. ‘Why, I thought he was going to stay with you another ten days at least.’

‘So did I–so did he,’ said Mrs. Thornburgh, nodding, and then pausing with a most effective air of sudden gravity and ‘recollection.’

‘Then why–what’s the matter?’ asked Mrs. Leyburn, wondering.

Mrs. Thornburgh did not answer for a minute, and Mrs. Leyburn began to feel a little nervous, her visitor’s eyes were fixed upon her with so much meaning. Urged by a sudden impulse, she bent forward; so did Mrs. Thornburgh, and their two elderly heads nearly touched.

‘The young man is in love!’ said the vicar’s wife in a stage whisper, drawing back after a pause, to see the effect of her announcement.

‘Oh! with whom?’ asked Mrs. Leyburn, her look brightening. She liked a love affair as much as ever.

Mrs. Thornburgh furtively looked round to see if the door was shut and all safe–she felt herself a criminal, but the sense of guilt had an exhilarating rather than a depressing affect upon her.

‘Have you guessed nothing? have the girls told you anything?’

‘No!’ said Mrs. Leyburn, her eyes opening wider and wider. She never guessed anything; there was no need, with three daughters to think for her, and give her the benefit of their young brains. ‘No,’ she said again. ‘I can’t imagine what you mean.’

Mrs. Thornburgh felt a rush of inward contempt for so much obtuseness.

‘Well, then, _he is in love with Catherine!_’ she said abruptly, laying her hand on Mrs. Leyburn’s knee, and watching the effect.

‘With Catherine!’ stammered Mrs. Leyburn; ‘_with Catherine!_’

The idea was amazing to her. She took up her knitting with trembling fingers, and went on with it mechanically a second or two. Then laying it down–‘Are you quite sure? has he told you?’

‘No, but one has eyes,’ said Mrs. Thornburgh hastily. ‘William and I have seen it from the very first day. And we are both certain that on Tuesday she made him understand in some way or other that she wouldn’t marry him, and that is why he went off to Ullswater, and why he made up his mind to go south before his time is up.’

‘Tuesday?’ cried Mrs. Leyburn. ‘In that walk, do you mean, when Catherine looked so tired afterward? You think he proposed in that walk?’

She was in a maze of bewilderment and excitement.

‘Something like it–but if he did, she said “No;” and what I want to know is _why_ she said “No.”‘

‘Why, of course, because she didn’t care for him!’ exclaimed Mrs. Leyburn, opening her blue eyes wider and wider. ‘Catherine’s not like most girls; she would always know what she felt, and would never keep a man in suspense.’

‘Well, I don’t somehow believe,’ said Mrs. Thornburgh boldly, ‘that she doesn’t care for him. He is just the young man Catherine might care for. You can see that yourself.’

Mrs. Leyburn once more laid down her knitting and stared at her visitor. Mrs. Thornburgh, after all her meditations, had no very precise idea as to _why_ she was at that moment in the Burwood living-room bombarding Mrs. Leyburn in this fashion. All she knew was that she had sallied forth determined somehow to upset the situation, just as one gives a shake purposely to a bundle of spillikins on the chance of more favorable openings. Mrs. Leyburn’s mind was just now playing the part of spillikins, and the vicar’s wife was shaking it viciously, though with occasional qualms as to the lawfulness of the process.

‘You think Catherine does care for him?’ resumed Mrs. Leyburn tremulously.

‘Well isn’t he just the kind of man one would suppose Catherine would like?’ repeated Mrs. Thornburgh, persuasively: ‘he is a clergyman, and she likes serious people; and he’s sensible and nice and well-mannered. And then he can talk about books, just like her father used–I’m sure William thinks he knows everything! He isn’t as nice-looking as he might be just now, but then that’s his hair and his fever, poor man. And then he isn’t hanging about. He’s got a living, and there’d be the poor people all ready, and everything else Catherine likes. And now I’ll just ask you–did you ever see Catherine more–more–_lively_–well, I know that’s not just the word, but you know what I mean–than she has been the last fortnight?’

But Mrs. Leyburn only shook her head helplessly. She did not know in the least what Mrs. Thornburgh meant. She never thought Catherine doleful, and she agreed that certainly ‘lively’ was not the word.

‘Girls get so frightfully particular nowadays,’ continued the vicar’s wife, with reflective candor. ‘Why, when William fell in love with me, I just fell in love with him–at once–because he did. And if it hadn’t been William, but somebody else, it would have been the same. I don’t believe girls have got hearts like pebbles–if the man’s nice, of course!’

Mrs. leyburn listened to this summary of matrimonial philosophy with the same yielding, flurried attention as she was always disposed to give to the last speaker.

‘But,’ she said, still in a maze, ‘if she did care for him, why should she send him away?’

‘_Because she won’t have him!_’ said Mrs. Thornburgh, energetically, leaning over the arm of her chair that she might bring herself nearer to her companion.

The fatuity of the answer left Mrs. Leyburn staring.

‘Because she won’t have him, my dear Mrs. Leyburn! And–and–I’m sure nothing would make me interfere like this if I weren’t so fond of you all, and if William and I didn’t know for certain that there never was a better young man born! And then I was just sure you’d be the last person in the world, if you knew, to stand in young people’s way!’

‘_I!_’ cried poor Mrs. Leyburn–‘I stand in the way!’ She was getting tremulous and tearful, and Mrs. Thornburgh felt herself a brute.

‘Well,’ she said, plunging on desperately, ‘I have been thinking over it night and day. I’ve been watching him, and I’ve been talking to the girls, and I’ve been putting two and two together, and I’m just about sure that there might be a chance for Robert, if only Catherine didn’t feel that you and the girls couldn’t get on without her!’

Mrs. Leyburn took up her knitting again with agitated fingers. She was so long in answering, that Mrs. Thornburgh sat and thought with trepidation of all sorts of unpleasant consequences which might result from this audacious move of hers.

‘I don’t know how we _should_ get on,’ cried Mrs. Leyburn at last, with a sort of suppressed sob, while something very like a tear fell on the stocking she held.

Mrs. Thornburgh was still more frightened, and rushed into a flood of apologetic speech. Very likely she was wrong perhaps it was all a mistake, she was afraid she had done harm, and so on. Mrs. Leyburn took very little heed, but at last she said, looking up and applying a soft handkerchief gently to her eyes–

‘Is his mother nice? Where’s his living? Would he want to be married soon?’

The voice was weak and tearful, but there was in it unmistakable eagerness to be informed. Mrs. Thornburgh, overjoyed, let loose upon her a flood of particulars, painted the virtues and talents of Mrs. Elsmere, described Robert’s Oxford career, with an admirable sense for effect, and a truly feminine capacity for murdering every university detail, drew pictures of the Murewell living, and rectory, of which Robert had photographs with him, threw in adroit information about the young man’s private means, and in general showed what may be made of a woman’s mind under the stimulus of one of the occupations most proper to it. Mrs. Leyburn brightened visibly as the flood proceeded. Alas, poor Catherine! How little room there is for the heroic in this trivial everyday life of ours!

Catherine a bride, Catherine a wife and mother, dim visions of a white soft morsel in which Catherine’s eyes and smile should live again–all these thoughts went trembling and flashing through Mrs. Leyburn’s mind as she listened to Mrs. Thornburgh. There is so much of the artist in the maternal mind, of the artist who longs to see the work of his hand in fresh combinations and under all points of view. Catherine, in the heat of her own self-surrender, had perhaps forgotten that her mother too had a heart!

‘Yes, it all sounds very well’ said Mrs. Leyburn at last, sighing, ‘but, you know, Catherine isn’t easy to manage.’

‘Could you talk to her–find out a little?’

‘Well, not to-day; I shall hardly see her. Doesn’t it seem to you that when a girl takes up notions like Catherine’s she hasn’t time for thinking about the young men? Why, she’s as full of business all day long as an egg’s full of meat. Well, it was my poor Richard’s doing–it was his doing, bless him! I am not going to say anything against it but it was different–once.’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Mrs. Thornburgh, thoughtfully. ‘One had plenty of time, when you and I were young, to sit at home and think what one was going to wear, and how one would look, and whether he had been paying attention to any one else; and if he had, why; and all that. And now the young women are so superior. But the marrying has got to be done somehow all the same. What is she doing to-day?’

‘Oh, she’ll be busy all to-day and to-morrow; I hardly expect to see her till Saturday.’

Mrs. Thornburgh gave a start of dismay.

‘Why, what is the matter now?’ she cried in her most aggrieved tones. ‘My dear Mrs. Leyburn, one would think we had the cholera in the parish. Catherine just spoils the people.’

‘Don’t you remember,’ said Mrs. Leyburn, staring in her turn, and drawing herself up a little, ‘that to-morrow is Midsummer Day, and that Mary Backhouse is as bad as she can be?’

‘Mary Backhouse! Why I had forgotten all about her!’ cried the vicar’s wife, with sudden remorse. And she sat pensively eyeing the carpet awhile.

Then she got what particulars she could out of Mrs. Leyburn. Catherine, it appeared, was at this moment at High Ghyll, was not to return till late and would be with the dying girl through the greater part of the following day, returning for an hour or two’s rest in the afternoon, and staying in the evening till the twilight, in which the ghost always made her appearances, should have passed into night.

Mrs. Thornburgh listened to it all, her contriving mind working the while at railway speed on the facts presented to her.

‘How do you get her home tomorrow night?’ she asked, with sudden animation.

‘Oh, we send our man Richard at ten. He takes a lantern if it’s dark.’

Mrs. Thornburgh said no more. Her eyes and gestures were all alive again with energy and hope. She had given her shake to Mrs. Leyburn’s mind. Much good might it do! But, after all, she had the poorest opinion of the widow’s capacities as an ally.

She and her companion said a few more excited, affectionate, and apologetic things to one another, and then she departed.

Both mother and knitting were found by Agnes half an hour later in a state of considerable confusion. But Mrs. Leyburn kept her own counsel, having resolved for once, with a timid and yet delicious excitement, to act as the head of the family.

Meanwhile Mrs. Thornburgh was laying plans on her own account.

‘Ten o’clock-moonlight,’ said that contriving person to herself going home–‘at least if the clouds hold up–that’ll do–couldn’t be better.’

To any person familiar with her character the signs of some unusual preoccupation were clear enough in Mrs. Leyburn during this Thursday evening. Catherine noticed them at once when she got back from High Ghyll about eight o’clock, and wondered first of all what was the matter; and then, with more emphasis, why the trouble was not immediately communicated to her. It had never entered into her head to take her mother into her confidence with regard to Elsmere. Since she could remember, it had been an axiom in the family to spare the delicate nervous mother all the anxieties and perplexities of life. It was at system in which the subject of it had always acquiesced with perfect contentment, and Catherine had no qualms about it. If there was good news, it was presented in its most sugared form to Mrs. Leyburn; but the moment any element of pain and difficulty cropped up in the common life, it was pounced upon and appropriated by Catherine, aided and abetted by the girls, and Mrs. Leyburn knew no more about it than an unweaned babe.

So that Catherine was thinking at most of some misconduct of a Perth dyer with regard to her mother’s best gray poplin, when one of the greatest surprises of her life burst upon her.

She was in Mrs. Leyburn’s bedroom that night, helping to put away her mother’s things as her custom was. She had just taken off the widow’s cap, caressing as she did so the brown hair underneath, which was still soft and plentiful, when Mrs. Leyburn turned upon her. ‘Catherine!’ she said in an agitated voice, laying a thin hand on her daughter’s arm. ‘Oh, Catherine, I want to speak to you!’

Catherine knelt lightly down by her mother’s side and put her arms round her waist.

‘Yes mother darling,’ she said, half smiling.

‘Oh, Catherine! If–if–you like Mr. Elsmere–don’t mind–don’t think–about us, dear. We can manage–we can manage, dear!’

The change that took place in Catherine Leyburn’s face is indescribable. She rose instantly, her arms falling behind her, her beautiful brows drawn together. Mrs. Leyburn, looked up at her with a pathetic mixture of helplessness, alarm, entreaty.

‘Mother, who hag been talking to you about Mr. Elsmere and me?’ demanded Catherine.

‘Oh, never mind, dear, never mind,’ said the widow hastily; ‘I should have seen it myself–oh, I know I should; but I’m a bad mother, Catherine!’ and she caught her daughter’s dress and drew her toward her. _Do_ you care for him?’

Catherine did not answer. She knelt down again, and laid her head on her mother’s hands.

‘I want nothing,’ she said presently in a low voice of intense emotion–‘I want nothing but you and the girls. You are my life–I ask for nothing more. I am abundantly–content.’

Mrs. Leyburn gazed down on her with infinite perplexity. The brown hair, escaped from the cap, had fallen about her still pretty neck, a pink spot of excitement was on each gently hollowed cheek; she looked almost younger than her pale daughter.

‘But–he is very nice,’ she said timidly. ‘And he has a good living. Catherine, you ought to be a clergyman’s wife.’

‘I ought to be, and I am your daughter,’ said Catherine smiling, a little with an unsteady lip, and kissing her hand.

Mrs. Leyburn sighed and looked straight before her. Perhaps in imagination she saw the vicar’s wife. ‘I think–I think,’ she said very seriously, ‘I should like it.’

Catherine straightened herself brusquely at that. It was as though she had felt a blow.

‘Mother!’ she cried, with a stifled accent of pain, and yet still trying to smile, ‘do you want to send me away?’

‘No-no!’ cried Mrs. Leyburn hastily. ‘But if a nice man wants you to marry him, Catherine? Your father would have liked him–oh! I know your father would have liked him. And his manners to me are so pretty, I shouldn’t mind being _his_ mother-in-law. And the girls have no brother, you know, dear. Your father was always so sorry about that.’

She spoke with pleading agitation, her own tempting imaginations–the pallor, the latent storm of Catherine’s look–exciting her more and more.

Catherine was silent a moment, then she caught her mother’s hand again.

‘Dear little mother–dear, kind little mother! You are an angel–you always are. But I think, if you’ll keep me, I’ll stay.’

And she once more rested her head clingingly on Mrs. Leyburn’s knee.

But _do_ you–‘_do_ you love him, Catherine?’

‘I love you, mother, and the girls, and my life here.’

‘Oh dear,’ sighed Mrs. Leyburn, as though addressing a third person, the tears, in her mild eyes, ‘she won’t; and she _would_ like it–and so should I!’

Catherine rose, stung beyond bearing.

‘And I count for nothing to you, mother!’–her deep voice quivering; ‘you could put me aside–you and the girls, and live as though I had never been!’

‘But you would be a great deal to us if you did marry, Catherine!’ cried Mrs. Leyburn, almost with an accent of pettishness. ‘People have to do without their daughters. There’s Agnes–I often think, as it is, you might let her do more. And if Rose were troublesome, why, you know it might be a good thing–a very good thing if there were a man to take her in hand!’

‘And you, mother, without me?’ cried poor Catherine, choked.

‘Oh, I should come and see you,’ said Mrs. Leyburn, brightening. ‘They say it _is_ such a nice house, Catherine, and such pretty country, and I’m sure I should like his mother, though she _is_ Irish!’

It was the bitterest moment of Catherine Leyburn’s life. In it the heroic dream of years broke down. Nay, the shrivelling ironic touch of circumstance laid upon it made it look even in her own eyes almost ridiculous. What had she been living for, praying for, all these years? She threw herself down by the widow’s side, her face working with a passion that terrified Mrs. Leyburn.

‘Oh, mother, say you would miss me–say you would miss me if I went!’

Then Mrs. Leyburn herself broke down, and the two women clung to each other, weeping. Catherine’s sore heart was soothed a little by her mother’s tears, and by the broken words of endearment that were lavished on her. But through it all she felt that the excited imaginative desire in Mrs. Leyburn still persisted. It was the cheapening–the vulgarizing, so to speak, of her whole existence.

In the course of their long embrace Mrs. Leyburn let fall various items of news that showed Catherine very plainly who had been at work upon her mother, and one of which startled her.

‘He comes back tonight, my dear–and he goes on Saturday. Oh, and, Catherine, Mrs. Thornburgh says he does care so much. Poor young man!’

And Mrs. Leyburn looked, up at her now standing daughter with eyes as woe-begone for Elsmere as for herself.

‘Don’t talk about it any more, mother,’ Catherine implored. ‘You won’t sleep, and I shall be more wroth with Mrs. Thornbourgh than I am already.’

Mrs. Leyburn let herself be gradually soothed and coerced, and Catherine, with a last kiss to the delicate emaciated fingers on which the worn wedding ring lay slipping forward–in itself a history–left her at last to sleep.

‘And I don’t know much more than when I began!’ sighed the perplexed widow to herself, ‘Oh, I wish Richard was here–I do!’

Catherine’s night was a night of intense mental struggle. Her struggle was one with which the modern world has perhaps but scant sympathy. Instinctively we feel such things out of place in our easy indifferent generation. We think them more than half unreal. We are so apt to take it for granted that the world has outgrown the religious thirst for sanctification; for a perfect moral consistency, as it has outgrown so many of the older complications of the sentiment of honor. And meanwhile half the tragedy of our time lies in this perpetual clashing of two estimates of life–the estimate which is the offspring of the scientific spirit, and which is forever making the visible world fairer and more desirable in mortal eyes; and the estimate of Saint Augustine.

As a matter of fact, owing to some travelling difficulties, the vicar and Elsmere did not get home till noon on Friday. Catherine knew nothing of either delay or arrival. Mrs. Leyburn watched her with anxious timidity, but she never mentioned Elsmere’s name to any one on the Friday morning, and no one dared speak of him to her. She came home in the afternoon from the Backhouses’ absorbed apparently in the state of the dying girl, took a couple of hours rest, and hurried off again. She passed the vicarage with bent head, and never looked up.

‘She is gone!’ said Rose to Agnes as she stood at the window looking after her sister’s retreating figure, ‘It is all over! They can’t meet now. He will be off by nine to-morrow.’

The girl spoke with a lump in her throat, and flung herself down by the window, moodily watching the dark form against the fells. Catherine’s coldness seemed to make all life colder and more chilling–to fling a hard denial in the face of the dearest claims of earth.

The stormy light of the afternoon was fading toward sunset. Catherine walked on fast toward the group of houses at the head of the valley, in one of which lived the two old carriers who had worked such havoc with Mrs. Thornburgh’s housekeeping arrangements. She was tired physically, but she was still more tired mentally. She had the bruised feeling of one who has been humiliated before the world and before herself. Her self-respect was for the moment crushed, and the breach made in the wholeness of personal dignity had produced a strange slackness of nerve, extending both to body and mind. She had been convicted, it seemed to her, in her own eyes, and in those of her world, of an egregious over-estimate of her own value. She walked with hung head like one ashamed, the overstrung religious sense deepening her discomfiture at every step. How rich her life had always been in the conviction of usefulness–nay, indispensableness! Her mother’s persuasions had dashed it from her. And religious scruple, for her torment, showed her her past, transformed, alloyed with all sorts of personal prides and cravings, which stood unmasked now in a white light.

And he? Still near her for a few short hours! Every pulse in her had thrilled as she had passed the house which sheltered him. But she will see him no more. And she is glad. If he had stayed on, he too would have discovered how cheaply they held her–those dear ones of hers for whom she had lived till now! And she might have weakly yielded to his pity what she had refused to his homage. The strong nature is half tortured, half soothed by the prospect of his going. Perhaps when he is gone she will recover something of that moral equilibrium which has been, so shaken. At present she is a riddle to herself, invaded by a force she has no power to cope with, feeling the moral ground of years crumbling beneath her, and struggling feverishly for self-control.

As she neared the head of the valley the wind became less tempestuous. The great wall of High Fell, toward which she was walking, seemed to shelter her from its worst violence. But the hurrying clouds, the gleams of lurid light which every now and then penetrated into the valley from the west, across the dip leading to Shanmoor, the voice of the river answering the voice of the wind, and the deep unbroken shadow that covered the group of houses and trees toward which she was walking, all served to heighten the nervous depression which had taken hold of her. As she neared the bridge, however, leading to the little hamlet, beyond which northward all was stony loneliness and desolation, and saw in front of her the gray stone house, backed by the sombre red of a great copper beech, and overhung by crags, she had perforce to take herself by both hands, try and realize her mission afresh, and the scene which lay before her.

CHAPTER X.

Mary Backhouse, the girl whom Catherine had been visiting with regularity for many weeks, and whose frail life was this evening nearing a terrible and long-expected crisis, was the victim of a fate sordid and common enough, yet not without its elements of dark poetry. Some fifteen months before this Midsummer Day she had been the mistress of the lonely old house in which her father and uncle had passed their whole lives, in which she had been born, and in which, amid snowdrifts so deep that no doctor could reach them, her mother had passed away. She had been then strong and well favored, possessed of a certain masculine black-browed beauty, and of a temper which sometimes gave to it an edge and glow such as an artist of ambition might have been glad to catch. At the bottom of all the outward _sauvagerie_, however, there was a heart, and strong wants, which only affection and companionship could satisfy and tame. Neither were to be found in sufficient measure within her home. Her father and she were on fairly good terms, and had for each other, up to a certain point, the natural instincts of kinship. On her uncle, whom she regarded as half-witted, she bestowed alternate tolerance and jeers. She was, indeed, the only person whose remonstrances ever got under the wool with old Jim, and her sharp tongue had sometimes a cowing effect on his curious nonchalance which nothing else had. For the rest, they had no neighbors with whom the girl could fraternize, and Whinborough was too far off to provide any adequate food for her vague hunger after emotion and excitement.

In this dangerous morbid state she fell a victim to the very coarse attractions of a young farmer in the neighboring valley of Shanmoor. He was a brute with a handsome face, and a nature in which whatever grains of heart and conscience might have been interfused with the original composition had been long since swamped. Mary, who had recklessly flung herself into his power on one or two occasions, from a mixture of motives, partly passion, partly jealousy, partly ennui, awoke one day to find herself ruined, and a grim future hung before her. She had realized her doom for the first time in its entirety on the Midsummer Day preceding that we are now describing. On that day, she had walked over to Shanmoor in a fever of dumb rage and despair, to claim from her betrayer the fulfilment of his promise of marriage. He had laughed at her, and she had fled home in the warm rainy dusk, a prey to all those torturing terrors which only a woman _in extremis_ can know. And on her way back she had seen the ghost or ‘bogle’ of Deep Crag; the ghost had spoken to her, and she had reached home more dead than alive, having received what she at once recognized as her death sentence.

What had she seen? An effect of moonlit mist–a shepherd-boy bent on a practical joke–a gleam of white waterfall among the darkening rocks? What had she heard? The evening greeting of a passer by, wafted down to her from some higher path along the fell? distant voices in the farm enclosures beneath her feet? or simply the eerie sounds of the mountain, those weird earth-whispers which haunt the lonely places of nature? Who can tell? Nerves and brain were strained to their uttermost. The legend of the ghost–of the girl who had thrown her baby and herself into the tarn under the frowning precipitous cliffs which marked the western end of High Fell, and who had since then walked the lonely road to Shanmoor every Midsummer Night with her moaning child upon her arm–had flashed into Mary’s mind as she left the white-walled village of Shanmoor behind her, and climbed upward with her shame and her secret into the mists. To see the bogle was merely distressing and untoward; to be spoken to by the phantom voice was death. No one so addressed could hope to survive the following Midsummer Day. Revolving these things in her mind, along with the terrible details of her own story, the exhausted girl had seen her vision, and, as she firmly believed, incurred her doom.

A week later she had disappeared from home and from the neighborhood. The darkest stories were afloat. She had taken some money with her, and all trace of her was lost. The father had a period of gloomy taciturnity, during which his principal relief was got out of jeering and girding at his elder brother; the noodle’s eyes wandered and glittered more; his shrunken frame seemed more shrunken as he sat dangling his spindle less from the shaft of the carrier’s cart; his absence of mind was for a time more marked, and excused with less buoyancy and inventiveness than usual. But otherwise all went on as before. John Backhouse took no step, and for nine months nothing was heard of his daughter.

At last one cheerless March afternoon, Jim, Coming back from the Wednesday round with the cart, entered the farm kitchen, while John Backhouse was still wrangling at one of the other farmhouses of the hamlet about some disputed payment. The old man came in cold and weary, and the sight of the half-tended kitchen and neglected fire–they paid a neighbor to do the housework, as far as the care of her own seven children would let her–suddenly revived in his slippery mind the memory of his niece, who, with all her faults, had had the makings of a housewife, and for whom, in spite of her flouts and jeers, he had always cherished a secret admiration. As he came in he noticed that the door to the left hand, leading into what Westmoreland folk call the ‘house’ or sitting-room of the farm, was open. The room had hardly been used since Mary’s flight, and the few pieces of black oak and shining mahogany which adorned it had long ago fallen from their pristine polish. The geraniums and fuchsias with which she had filled the window all the summer before, had died into dry blackened stalks; and the dust lay heavy on the room, in spite of the well-meant but wholly ineffective efforts of the charwoman next door. The two old men had avoided the place for months past by common consent, and the door into it was hardly ever opened.

Now, however, it stood ajar, and old Jim going up to shut it, and looking in, was struck dumb with astonishment. For there on a wooden rocking chair, which had been her mothers favorite seat, sat Mary Backhouse, her feet on the curved brass fender, her eyes staring into the parlor grate. Her clothes, her face, her attitude of cowering chill and mortal fatigue, produced an impression which struck through the old man’s dull senses, and made him tremble so that his hand dropped from the handle of the door. The slight sound roused Mary, and she turned toward him. She said nothing for a few seconds, her hollow black eyes fixed upon him; then with a ghastly smile, and a voice so hoarse as to be scarcely audible,

‘Weel, aa’ve coom back. Ye’d maybe not expect me?’

There was a sound behind on the cobbles outside the kitchen door.

‘Yur feyther!’ cried Jim between his teeth. ‘Gang up-stairs wi’ ye.’

And he pointed to a door in the wall concealing a staircase to the upper story.

She sprang up, looked at the door and at him irresolutely, and then stayed where she was, gaunt, pale, fever-eyed, the wreck and ghost of her old self.

The steps neared. There was a rough voice in the kitchen, a surprised exclamation, and her father had pushed past his brother into the room.

John Backhouse no sooner saw his daughter than his dull weather-beaten face flamed into violence. With an oath he raised the heavy whip he held in his hand and flung himself toward her.

‘Naw, ye’ll not du’at!’ cried Jim, throwing himself with all his feeble strength on to his brother’s arm. John swore and struggled, but the old man stuck like a limpet.

‘You let ‘un aleann’ said Mary, drawing her tattered shawl over her breast. ‘If he aims to kill me, aa’ll not say naa. But lie needn’t moider hisself! There’s them abuve as ha’ taken care o’ that!’

She sank again into her chair, as though her limbs could not support her, and her eyes closed in utter indifference of a fatigue which had made even fear impossible.

The father’s arm dropped; he stood there sullenly looking at her. Jim, thinking she had fainted, went up to her, took a glass of water out of which she had already been drinking from the mahogany table, and held it to her lips. She drank a little, and then with a desperate effort raised herself, and clutching the arm of the chair, faced her father.

‘Ye’ll not hev to wait lang. Doan’t ye fash yersel. Maybe it ull comfort ye to knaw summat! Lasst Midsummer Day aa was on t’ Shanmoor road, i’ t’ gloaming. An’ aa saw theer t’ bogle,–thee knaws, t’ bogle o’ Bleacliff Tarn; an’ she turned hersel, an’ she spoak to me!’

She uttered the last words with a grim emphasis, dwelling on each, the whole life of the wasted face concentrated in the terrible black eyes, which gazed past the two figures within their immediate range into a vacancy peopled with horror. Then a film came over, them, the grip relaxed, and she fell back with a lurch of the rocking-chair in a dead swoon.

With the help of the neighbor from next door, Jim got her up-stairs into the room that had been hers. She awoke from her swoon only to fall into the torpid sleep of exhaustion, which lasted for twelve hours.

‘Keep her oot o’ ma way,’ said the father with an oath to Jim, ‘or aa’ll not answer nayther for her nor me!’

She needed no telling. She soon crept down-stairs again, and went to the task of house-cleaning. The two men lived in the kitchen as before; when they were at home she ate and sat in the parlor alone. Jim watched her as far as his dull brain was capable of watching, and he dimly understood that she was dying. Both men, indeed, felt a sort of superstitious awe of her, she was so changed, so unearthly. As for the story of the ghost, the old popular superstitions are almost dead in the Cumbrian mountains, and the shrewd north-country peasant is in many places quite as scornfully ready to sacrifice his ghosts to the Time Spirit as any ‘bold bad’ haunter of scientific associations could wish him to be. But in a few of the remoter valleys they still linger, though beneath the surface. Either of the Backhouses, or Mary in her days of health, would have suffered many things rather than allow a stranger to suppose they placed the smallest credence in the story of Bleacliff Tarn. But, all the same, the story which each had beard in childhood, on stormy nights perhaps, when the mountain side was awful with the sounds of tempest, had grown up with them, had entered deep into the tissue of consciousness. In Mary’s imagination the ideas and images connected with it had now, under the stimulus of circumstance, become instinct with a living pursuing terror. But they were present, though in a duller, blunter state, in the minds of her father and uncle; and as the weeks passed on, and the days lengthened toward midsummer, a sort of brooding horror seemed to settle on the house.

Mary grew weaker and weaker; her cough kept Jim awake at nights; once or twice when he went to help her with a piece of work which not even her extraordinary will could carry her through, her hand burnt him like a hot cinder. But she kept all other women out of the house by her mad, strange ways; and if her uncle showed any consciousness of her state, she turned upon him with her old temper, which had lost all its former stormy grace, and had become ghastly by the contrast it brought out between the tempestuous, vindictive soul and the shaken weakness of frame.

A doctor would have discovered at once that what was wrong with her was phthisis, complicated with insanity; and the insanity, instead of taking the hopeful optimistic tinge which is characteristic of the insanity of consumption, had rather assumed the color of the events from which the disease itself had started. Cold, exposure, long-continued agony of mind and body–the madness intertwined with an illness which had such roots as these was naturally a madness of despair. One of its principal signs was the fixed idea as to Midsummer Day. It never occurred to her as possible that her life should be prolonged beyond that limit. Every night, as she dragged herself up the steep little staircase to her room, she checked off the day which had just passed from the days she had still to live. She had made all her arrangements; she had even sewed with her own hands, and that without any sense of special horror, but rather in the provident peasant way, the dress in which she was to be carried to her grave.

At last one day, her father, coming unexpectedly into the yard, saw her carrying a heavy pail of water from the pump. Something stirred within him, and he went up to her and forcibly took it from her. Their looks met, and her poor mad eyes gazed intensely into his. As he moved forward toward the house she crept after him, passing him into the parlor, where she sank down breathless on the settle where she had been sleeping for the last few nights, rather than face climbing the stairs. For the first time he followed her, watching her gasping struggle for breath, in spite of her impatient motion to him to go. After a few seconds he left her, took his hat, went out, saddled his horse, and rode off to Whinborough. He got Dr. Baker to promise to come over on the morrow, and on his way back he called and requested to see Catherine Leyburn. He stammeringly asked her to come and visit his daughter who was ill and lonesome; and when she consented gladly, he went on his way feeling a load off his mind. What he had just done had been due to an undefined, but still vehement prompting of conscience. It did not make it any the less probable that the girl would die on or before Midsummer Day; but, supposing her story were true, it absolved him from any charge of assistance to the designs of those grisly powers in whose clutch she was.

When the doctor came next morning a change for the worse had taken place, and she was too feeble actively to resent his appearance. She lay there on the settle, every now and then making superhuman efforts to get up, which generally ended in a swoon. She refused to take any medicine, she would hardly take any food, and to the doctor’s questions she returned no answer whatever. In the same way, when Catherine came, she would be absolutely silent, looking at her with glittering, feverish eyes, but taking no notice at all, whether she read or talked, or simply sat quietly beside her.

After the silent period, as the days went on, and Midsummer Day drew nearer, there supervened a period of intermittent delirium. In the evenings, especially when her temperature rose, she became talkative and incoherent and Catherine would sometimes tremble as she caught the sentences which, little by little, built up the girl’s bidden tragedy before her eyes. London streets, London lights, London darkness, the agony of an endless wandering, the little clinging puny life, which could never be stilled or satisfied, biting cold, intolerable pain, the cheerless workhouse order, and, finally, the arms without a burden, the breast without a child–these were the sharp fragments of experience, so common so terrible to the end of time, which rose on the troubled surface of Mary Backhouse’s delirium, and smote the tender heart of the listener.

Then in the mornings she would lie suspicious and silent, watching Catherine’s face with the long gaze of exhaustion, as though trying to find out from it whether her secret had escaped her. The doctor, who had gathered the story of the ‘bogle’ from Catherine, to whom Jim had told it, briefly and reluctantly, and with an absolute reservation of his own views on the matter, recommended that if possible they should try and deceive her as to the date of the day and month. Mere nervous excitement might, he thought, be enough to kill her when the actual day, and hour came round. But all their attempts were useless. Nothing distracted the intense sleepless attention with which the darkened mind kept always in view that one absorbing expectation. Words fell from her at night, which seemed to show that she expected a summons–a voice along the fell, calling her spirit into the dark. And then would come the shriek, the struggle to get loose, the choked waking, the wandering, horror-stricken eyes, subsiding by degrees into the old silent watch.

On the morning of the 23d, when Robert, sitting at his work, was looking at Burwood through the window in the flattering belief that Catherine was the captive of the weather, she had spent an hour or more with Mary Backhouse, and the austere influences of the visit had perhaps had more share than she knew in determining her own mood that day. The world seemed such dross, the pretences of personal happiness so hollow and delusive, after such a sight! The girl lay dying fast, with a look of extraordinary attentiveness in her face, hearing every noise, every footfall, and, as it seemed to Catherine, in a mood of inward joy. She took, moreover, some notice of her visitor. As a rough tomboy of fourteen, she had shown Catherine, who had taught her in the school sometimes and had especially won her regard on one occasion by a present of some article of dress, a good many uncouth signs of affection. On the morning in question Catherine fancied she saw something of the old childish expression once or twice. At any rate, there was no doubt her presence was soothing, as she read in her low vibrating voice, or sat silently stroking the emaciated hand, raising it every now and then to her lips with a rush of that intense pitifulness which was to her the most natural of all moods.

The doctor, whom she met there, said that this state of calm was very possibly only transitory. The night had been passed in a succession of paroxysms, and they were almost sure to return upon her, especially as he could get her to swallow none of the sedatives which might have carried her in unconsciousness past the fatal moment. She would have none of them; he thought that she was determined to allow of no encroachments on the troubled remnants of intelligence still left to her; so the only thing to be done was to wait and see the result. ‘I will come tomorrow,’ said Catherine briefly; ‘for the day certainly, longer if necessary.’ She had long ago established her claim to be treated seriously as a nurse, and Dr. Baker made no objection. ‘_If_ she lives so long,’ he said dubiously. ‘The Backhouses and Mrs. Irwin (the neighbor) shall be close at hand. I will come in the afternoon and try to get her to take an opiate; but I can’t give it to her by force, and there is not the smallest chance of her consenting to it.’

All through Catherine’s own struggle and pain during these two days the image of the dying girl had lain at her heart. It served her as the crucifix serves the Romanist; as she pressed it into her thought, it recovered from time to time the failing forces of the will. Need life be empty because self was left unsatisfied? Now, as she neared the hamlet, the quality of her nature reasserted itself. The personal want tugging at her senses, the personal soreness, the cry of resentful love, were silenced. What place had they in the presence of this lonely agony of death, this mystery, this opening beyond? The old heroic mood revived in her. Her step grew swifter, her carriage more erect, and as she entered the farm kitchen she felt herself once more ready in spirit for what lay before her.

From the next room there came a succession of husky sibilant sounds, as though someone were whispering hurriedly and continuously.

After her subdued greeting, she looked inquiringly at Jim.

‘She’s in a taaking way,’ said Jim, who looked more attenuated and his face more like a pink and white parchment than ever. ‘She’s been knacking an’ taaking a long while. She woau’t know ye. Luke ye,’ he continued, dropping his voice as he opened the ‘house’ door for her; ‘ef you want ayder ov oos, you just call oot–sharp! Mrs. Irwin, she’ll stay in wi’ ye–she’s not afeeard!’

The superstitious excitement which the looks and gestures of the old man expressed, touched Catherine’s imagination, and she entered the room with an inward shiver.

Mary Backhouse lay raised high on her pillows, talking to herself or to imaginary other persons, with eyes wide open but vacant, and senses conscious of nothing but the dream-world in which the mind was wandering. Catherine sat softly down beside her, unnoticed, thankful for the chances of disease. If this delirium lasted till the ghost-hour–the time of twilight, that is to say, which would begin about half-past eight, and the duration of which would depend on the cloudiness of the evening–was over; or, better still, till midnight were past; the strain on the girl’s agonized senses might be relieved, and death come at last in softer, kinder guise.

‘Has she been long like this?’ she asked softly of the neighbor who sat quietly knitting by the evening light.

The woman looked up and thought.

‘Ay!’ she said. ‘Aa came in at tea-time, an’ she’s been maistly taakin’ ivver sence!’

The incoherent whisperings and restless movements, which obliged Catherine constantly to replace the coverings over the poor wasted and fevered body, went on for sometime. Catherine noticed presently, with a little thrill, that the light was beginning to change. The weather was growing darker and stormier; the wind shook the house in gusts; and the farther shoulder of High Fell, seen in distorted outline through the casemented window, was almost hidden by the trailing rain clouds. The mournful western light coming from behind the house struck the river here and there; almost everything else was gray and dark. A mountain ash, just outside the window, brushed the panes every now and then; and in the silence, every surrounding sound–the rare movements in the next room, the voices of quarrelling children round the door of a neighboring house, the far-off barking of dogs–made itself distinctly audible.

Suddenly Catherine, sunk in painful reverie, noticed that the mutterings from the bed had ceased for some little time. She turned her chair, and was startled to find those weird eyes fixed with recognition on herself. There was a curious, malign intensity, a curious triumph in them.

‘It must be–eight o’clock’–said the gasping voice–‘_eight o’clock_;’ and the tone became a whisper, as though the idea thus half involuntarily revealed had been drawn jealously back into the strongholds of consciousness.

‘Mary,’ said Catherine, falling on her knees beside the bed, and taking one of the restless hands forcibly into her own–‘can’t you put this thought away from you? We are not the playthings of evil spirits–we are the children of God! We are in His hands. No evil thing can harm us against His will.’

It was the first time for many days she had spoken openly of the thought which was in the mind of all, and her whole pleading soul was in her pale, beautiful face. There was no response in the sick girl’s countenance, and again that look of triumph, of sinister exultation. They had tried to cheat her into sleeping, and living, and in spite of them, at the supreme moment, every sense was awake and expectant. To what was the materialized peasant imagination looking forward? To an actual call, an actual following, to the free mountain-side, the rush of the wind, the phantom figure floating on before her, bearing her into the heart of the storm? Dread was gone, pain was gone; there was only rapt excitement and fierce anticipation.

‘Mary,’ said Catherine again, mistaking her mood for one of tense defiance and despair, ‘Mary, if I were to go out now and leave Mrs. Irwin with you, and if I were to go up all the way to the top of Shanmoss and back again, and if I could tell you there was nothing there, nothing!–If I were to stay out till the dark has come–it will be here in half an hour–and you could be quite sure when you saw me again, that there was nothing near you but the dear old hills, and the power of God, could you believe me and try and rest and sleep?’

Mary looked at her intently. If Catherine could have seen clearly in the dim light she would have caught something of the cunning of madness slipping into the dying woman’s expression. While she waited for the answer, there was a noise in the kitchen outside an opening of the outer door, and a voice. Catherine’s heart stood still. She had to make a superhuman effort to keep her attention fixed on Mary.

‘Go!’ said the hoarse whisper close beside her, and the girl lifted her wasted hand, and pushed her visitor from her. ‘Go!’ it repeated insistently, with a sort of wild beseeching then, brokenly, the gasping breath interrupting: ‘There’s naw fear–naw fear–fur the likes o’ you!’

Catherine rose.

‘I’m not afraid,’ she said gently, but her hand shook as she pushed her chair back; ‘God is everywhere, Mary.’

She put on her hat and cloak, said something in Mrs. Irwin’s ear, and stooped to kiss the brow which to the shuddering sense under her will seemed already cold and moist with the sweats of death. Mary watched her go; Mrs. Irwin, with the air of one bewildered, drew her chair nearer to the settle; and the light of the fire, shooting and dancing through the June twilight, threw such fantastic shadows over the face on the pillow that all expression was lost. What was moving in the crazed mind? Satisfaction, perhaps, at having got rid of one witness, one gaoler, one of the various antagonistic forces surrounding her? She had a dim, frenzied notion she should have to fight for her liberty when the call came, and she lay tense and rigid, waiting–the images of insanity whirling through her brain, while the light slowly, slowly waned.

Catherine opened the door to the kitchen. The two carriers were standing there, and Robert Elsmere also stood with his back to her, talking to them in an undertone.

He turned at the sound behind him, and his start brought a sudden rush to Catherine’s check. Her face, as the candle-light struck it amid the shadows of the doorways was like an angelic vision to him–the heavenly calm of it just exquisitely broken by the wonder, the shock, of his presence.

‘You here?’ he cried coming up to her, and taking her hand–what secret instinct guided him?–close in both of his. ‘I never dreamt of it–so late. My cousin sent me over–she wished for news.’

She smiled involuntarily. It seemed to her she had expected this in some sort all along. But her self-possession was complete.

‘The excited state may be over in a short time now,’ she answered him in a quiet whisper; ‘but at present it is at its height. It seemed to please her’–and withdrawing her hand she turned to John Backhouse–‘when I suggested that I should walk up to Shanmoss and back. I said I would come back to her in half an hour or so, when the daylight was quite gone, and prove to her there was nothing on the path.’

A hand caught her arm. It was Mrs. Irwin, holding the door close with the other hand.

‘Miss Leyburn–Miss Catherine! Yur not gawin’ oot–not gawin’ oop _that_ path?’ The woman was fond of Catherine, and looked deadly frightened.

‘Yes, I am, Mrs. Irwin–but I shall be back very soon. Don’t leave her; go back.’ And Catherine motioned her back with a little peremptory gesture.

‘Doan’t ye let ‘ur, sir,’ said the woman excitedly to Robert. ‘One’s eneuf oneut aa’m thinking.’ And she pointed with a meaning gesture to the room behind her.

Robert looked at Catherine, who was moving toward the outer door.

‘I’ll go with her,’ he said hastily, his face lighting up. ‘There is nothing whatever to be afraid of, only don’t leave your patient.’

Catherine trembled as she heard the words, but she made no sign, and the two men and the women watched their departure with blank uneasy wonderment. A second later they were on the fell-side climbing a rough stony path, which in places was almost a watercourse, and which wound up the fell toward a tract of level swampy moss or heath, beyond which lay the descent to Shanmoor. Daylight was almost gone; the stormy yellow west was being fast swallowed up in cloud; below them as they climbed lay the dark group of houses, with a light twinkling here and there. All about them were black mountain forms; a desolate tempestuous wind drove a gusty rain into their faces; a little beck roared beside them, and in the distance from the black gulf of the valley the swollen river thundered.

Elsmere looked down on his companion with an indescribable exultation, a passionate sense of possession which could hardly restrain itself. He had come back that morning with a mind clearly made up. Catherine had been blind indeed when she supposed that any plan of his or hers would have been allowed to stand in the way of that last wrestle with her, of which he had planned all the methods, rehearsed all the arguments. But when he reached the Vicarage he was greeted with the news of her absence. She was inaccessible it appeared for the day. No matter! The vicar and he settled in the fewest possible words that he should stay till Monday, Mrs. Thornburgh meanwhile looking on, saying what civility demanded, and surprisingly little else. Then in the evening Mrs. Thornburgh had asked of him, with a manner of admirable indifference, whether he felt inclined for an evening walk to High Ghyll to inquire after Mary Backhouse. The request fell in excellently with a lover’s restlessness, and Robert assented at once. The vicar saw him go with puzzled brows and a quick look at his wife, whose head was bent close over her worsted work.

It never occurred to Elsmere–or if it did occur, he pooh-poohed the notion–that he should find Catherine still at her post far from home on this dark stormy evening. But in the glow of joy which her presence had brought him he was still capable of all sorts of delicate perceptions and reasonings. His quick imagination carried him through the scene from which she had just momentarily escaped. He had understood the exaltation of her look and tone. If love spoke at all, ringed with such surroundings, it must be with its most inward and spiritual voice, as those speak who feel ‘the Eternities’ about them.

But the darkness hid her from him so well that he had to feel out the situation for himself. He could not trace it in her face.

‘We must go right up to the top of the pass,’ she said to him as he held a gate open for her which led them into a piece of larch plantation on the mountain-side. ‘The ghost is supposed to walk along this bit of road above the houses, till it reaches the heath on the top, and then it turns toward Bleacliff Tarn, which lies higher up to the right, under High Fell.’

‘Do you imagine your report will have any effect?’

‘At any rate,’ she said, sighing, ‘it seemed to me that it might divert her thoughts a little from the actual horror of her own summons. Anything is better than the torture of that one fixed idea as she lies there.’

‘What is that?’ said Robert, startled a little by some ghostly sounds in front of them. The little wood was almost dark, and he could see nothing.

‘Only a horse trotting on in front of us,’ said Catherine; ‘our voices frightened him, I suppose. We shall be out on the fell again directly.’

And as they quitted the trees, a dark bulky form to the left suddenly lifted a shadowy head from the grass, and clattered down the slope.

A cluster of white-stemmed birches just ahead of them, caught whatever light was still left in the atmosphere, their feathery tops bending and swaying against the sky.

‘How easily, with a mind attuned, one could people this whole path with ghosts!’ said Robert. ‘Look at those stems, and that line of stream coming down to the right, and listen to the wind among the fern.’

For they were passing a little gully deep in bracken, up which the blast was tearing its tempestuous way.

Catherine shivered a little, and the sense of physical exhaustion, which had been banished like everything else–doubt, humiliation, bitterness–by the one fact of his presence, came back on her.

‘There is something, rather awful in this dark and storm,’ she said, and paused.

‘Would you have faced it alone?’ he asked, his voice thrilling her with a hundred different meanings. ‘I am glad I prevented it.’

‘I have no fear of the mountains,’ she said, trembling ‘I know them, and they me.’

‘But you are tired–your voice is tired–and the walk might have been more of an effort than you thought it. Do you never think of yourself?’

‘Oh dear, yes,’ said Catherine, trying to smile, and could find nothing else to say. They walked on a few moments in silence, splashes of rain breaking in their faces. Robert’s inward excitement was growing fast. Suddenly Catherine’s pulse stood still. She felt her hand lifted, drawn within his arm, covered close with his warm, trembling clasp.

‘Catherine, let it stay there. Listen one moment. You gave me a hard lesson yesterday, too hard–I cannot learn it–I am bold–I claim you. Be my wife. Help me through this difficult world. I have loved you from the first moment. Come to me. Be kind to me.’

She could hardly see his face, but she could feel the passion in his voice and touch. Her Cheek seemed to droop against his arm. He felt her tottering.

‘Let me sit down,’ she said; and after one moment of dizzy silence he guided her to a rock, sinking down himself beside her, longing, but not daring, to shelter her under his broad Inverness cloak against the storm.

‘I told you,’ she said, almost whispering, ‘that I was bound, tied to others.’

‘I do not admit your plea,’ he said passionately; ‘no, not for a moment. For two days have I been tramping over the mountains thinking it out for yourself and me. Catherine, your mother has no son, she would find one in me. I have no sisters–give me yours. I will cherish them as any brother could. Come and enrich my life; you shall still fill and shelter theirs. I dare not think what my future might be without you to guide, to inspire, to bless–dare not–lest with a word you should plunge me into an outer darkness I cannot face.’

He caught her unresisting hand, and raised it to his lips.

‘Is there no sacredness,’ he said, brokenly, ‘in the fate that has brought us together-out of all the world–here in this lonely valley? Come to me, Catherine. You shall never fail the old ties, I promise you; and new hands shall cling to you–new voices shall call you blessed.’

Catherine could hardly breathe. Every word had been like balm upon a wound–like a ray of intense light in the gloom about them. Oh, where was this softness bearing her–this emptiness of all will, of all individual power? She hid her eyes with her other hand, struggling to recall that far away moment in Marrisdale. But the mind refused to work. Consciousness seemed to retain nothing but the warm grasp of his hand–the tones of his voice.

He saw her struggle, and pressed on remorselessly.

‘Speak to me–say one little kind word. Oh, you cannot send me away miserable and empty!’

She turned to him, and laid her trembling free hand on his arm. He clasped them both with rapture.

‘Give me a little time.’

‘No, no,’ he said, and it almost seemed to her that he was smiling: ‘time for you to escape me again my wild mountain bird; time for you to think yourself and me into all sorts of moral mists! No, you shall not have it. Here–alone with God and the dark–bless me or undo me. Send me out to the work of life maimed and sorrowful, or send me out your knight, your possession, pledged–‘

But his voice failed him. What a note of youth, of imagination, of impulsive eagerness there was through it all! The more slowly moving, inarticulate nature was swept away by it. There was but one object clear to her in the whole world of thought or sense, everything else had sunk out of sight–drowned in a luminous mist.

He rose and stood before her as he delivered his ultimatum, his tall form drawn up to its full height. In the east, across the valley, above the farther buttress of High Fell, there was a clearer strip of sky, visible for a moment among the moving storm-clouds, and a dim haloed moon shone out in it. Far away a white-walled cottage glimmered against the fell: the pools at their feet shone in the weird, passing light.

She lifted her head, and looked at him, still irresolute. Then she too rose, and helplessly, like someone impelled by a will not her own, she silently held out to him two white, trembling hands.

‘Catherine–my angel–my wife!’

There was something in the pale, virginal grace of look and form which kept his young passion in awe. But he bent his head again over those yielded hands, kissing them with dizzy, unspeakable joy.

* * * * * * * * * * *

About twenty minutes later Catherine and Robert, having hurried back with all speed from the top of Shanmoss, reached the farmhouse door. She knocked. No one answered. She tried the lock; it yielded, and they entered. No one in the kitchen. She looked disturbed and conscience-sticken.

‘Oh!’ she cried to him, under her breath; ‘have we been too long?’ And hurrying into the inner room she left him waiting.

Inside was a mournful sight. The two men and Mrs. Irwin stood close round the settle, but as she came nearer, Catherine saw Mary Backhouse lying panting on her pillows, her breath coming in loud gasps, her dress and all the coverings of the bed showing signs of disorder and confusion, her black hair tossed about her.

‘It’s bin awfa’ work sence you left, miss,’ whispered Mrs. Irwin to Catherine excitedly, as she joined them. ‘She thowt she heerd soombody fleytin’ and callin’–it was t’ wind came skirlin’ round t’ place, an’ she aw’ but thrown hirsel’ oot ‘o’ t’ bed, an’ aa shooted for Tim, and they came, and they and I–it’s bin as much as we could a’ du to hod ‘er.’

‘Luke! Steady!’ exclaimed Jim. ‘She’ll try it again.’

For the hands were moving restlessly from side to side, and the face was working again. There was one more desperate effort to rise, which the two men checked–gently enough, but effectually–and then the exhaustion seemed complete. The lids fell, and the struggle for breath was pitiful.

Catherine flew for some drugs which the doctor had left, and shown her how to use. After some twenty minutes they seemed to give relief, and the great haunted eyes opened once more.

Catherine held barley-water to the parched lips, and Mary drank mechanically, her gaze still intently fixed on her nurse. When Catherine put down the glass the eyes followed her with a question which the lips had no power to frame.

‘Leave her now a little,’ said Catherine to the others. ‘The fewer people and the more air the better. And please let the door be open: the room is too hot.’

They went out silently, and Catherine sank down beside the bed. Her heart went out in unspeakable longing toward the poor human wreck before her. For her there was no morrow possible, no dawn of other and softer skies. All was over: life was lived, and all its heavenly capabilities missed forever. Catherine felt her own joy hurt her, and her tears fell fast.

‘Mary,’ she said, laying her face close beside the chill face on the pillow, ‘Mary, I went out: I climbed all the path as far as Shanmoss. There was nothing evil there. Oh, I must tell you! Can I make you understand? I want you to feel that it is only God and love that are real. Oh, think of them! He would not let you be hurt and terrified in your pain, poor Mary. He loves you. He is waiting to comfort you–to set you free from pain forever: and He has sent you a sign by me.’ . . . She lifted her head from the pillow, trembling and hesitating. Still that feverish, questioning gaze on the face beneath her, as it lay in deep shadow cast by a light on the windowsill some paces away.

‘You sent me out, Mary, to search for something, the thought of which has been tormenting and torturing you. You thought God would let a dark lost spirit trouble you and take you away from Him–you, His child, whom He made and whom He loves! And listen! While you thought you were sending me out to face the evil thing, you were really my kind angel–God’s messenger–sending me to meet the joy of my whole life!

‘There was some one waiting here just now,’ she went on hurriedly, breathing her sobbing words into Mary’s ear. ‘Some one who has loved me, and whom I love. But I had made him sad, and myself; then when you sent me out he came too, we walked up that path, you remember beyond the larchwood, up to the top, where the stream goes under the road. And there he spoke to me, and I couldn’t help it any more. And I promised to love him and be his wife. And if it hadn’t been for you, Mary, it would never have happened. God had put it into your hand, this joy, and I bless you for it! Oh, and Mary–Mary–it is only for a little little while this life of ours! Nothing matters–not our worst sin and sorrow–but God, and our love to Him. I shall meet you some day–I pray I may–in His sight and all will be well, the pain all forgotten–all!’

She raised herself again and looked down with yearning passionate pity on the shadowed form. Oh, blessed answer of heart to heart! There were tears forming under the heavy lids, the corners of the lips were relaxed and soft. Slowly the feeble hand sought her own. She waited in an intense, expectant silence.

There was a faint breathing from the lips, she stooped, and caught it.

‘Kiss me!’ said the whisper, and she laid her soft fresh lips to the parched mouth of the dying. When she lifted her head again Mary still held her hand; Catherine softly stretched out hers for the opiate Dr. Baker had left; it was swallowed without resistance, and a quiet to which the invalid had been a stranger for days stole little by little over the wasted frame. The grasp of the fingers relaxed, the labored breath came more gently, and in a few more minutes she slept. Twilight was long over. The ghost-hour was passed, and the moon outside was slowly gaining a wider empire in the clearing heavens.

It was a little after ten o’clock that Rose drew aside the curtain at Burwood and looked out.

‘There is the lantern,’ she said to Agnes, ‘just by the vicarage. How the night has cleared!’

She turned back to her book. Agnes was writing letters. Mrs. Leyburn was sitting by the bit of fire that was generally lit for her benefit in the evenings, her white shawl dropping gracefully about her, a copy of the _Cornhill_ on her lap. But she was not reading, she was meditating, and the girls thought her out of spirits. The hall door opened.

‘There is some one with Catherine!’ cried Rose starting up. Agnes suspended her letter.

‘Perhaps the vicar,’ said Mrs. Leyburn, with a little sigh.

A hand turned the drawing-room door, and in the door-way stood Elsmere. Rose caught a gray dress disappearing up the little stairs behind him.

Elsmere’s look was enough for the two girls. They understood in an instant. Rose flushed all over. The first contact with love is intoxicating to any girl of eighteen, even though the romance be not hers. But Mrs. Leyburn sat bewildered.

Elsmere went up to her, stooped and took her hand.

‘Will you give her to me, Mrs. Leyburn?’ he said, his boyish looks aglow, his voice unsteady. ‘Will you let me be a son to you?’

Mrs. Leyburn rose. He still held her hand. She looked up at him helplessly.

‘Oh, Mr. Elsmere, where is Catherine?’

‘I brought her home,’ he said gently, ‘She is mine, if you will it. Give her to me again!’

Mrs. Leyburn’s face worked pitifully. The rectory and the wedding dress, which had lingered so regretfully in her thoughts since her last sight of Catherine, sank out of them altogether.

‘She has been everything in the world to us, Mr. Elsmere.’

‘I know she has,’ he said simply. ‘She shall be everything in the world to you still. I have had hard work to persuade her. There will be no chance for me if you don’t help me.’

Another breathless pause, Then Mrs. Leyburn timidly drew him to her, and he stooped his tall head and kissed her like a son.

‘Oh, I must go to Catherine!’ she said hurrying away, her pretty withered cheeks wet with tears.

Then the girls threw themselves on Elsmere. The talk was all animation and excitement for the moment, not a tragic touch in it. It was as well perhaps that Catherine was not there to hear!

‘I give you fair warning,’ said Rose, as she bade him good-night, ‘that I don’t know how to behave to a brother. And I am equally sure that Mrs. Thornburgh doesn’t know how to behave to _fiance_.’

Robert threw up his hands in mock terror at the name and departed.

‘We are abandoned,’ cried Rose, flitting herself into the chair again–then with a little flash of half irresolute wickedness–‘and we are free! Oh, I hope she will be happy!’

And she caught Agnes wildly round the neck as though she would drown her first words in her last.

‘Madcap!’ cried Agnes struggling. ‘Leave me at least a little breath to wish Catherine joy!’

And they both fled up-stairs.

There was indeed no prouder woman in the three kingdoms than Mrs. Thornburgh that night. After all the agitation down-stairs she could not persuade herself to go to bed. She first knocked up Sarah and communicated the news; then she sat down before a pier-glass in her own room studying the person who had found Catherine Leyburn a husband.

‘My doing from beginning to end,’ she cried with a triumph beyond words. ‘William has had _nothing_ to do with it. Robert has had scarcely as much. And to think how little I dreamt of it when I began! Well, to be sure, no one could have _planned_ marrying those two. There’s no one but Providence could have foreseen it-they’re so different. And after all it’s _done_. Now then, whom shall I have next year?’

BOOK II.

SURREY.

CHAPTER XI.

Farewell to the mountains!

The scene in which the next act of this unpretending history is to run its course is of a very different kind. In place of the rugged northern nature–a nature wild and solitary indeed, but still rich, luxuriant, and friendly to the senses of the traveller, even in its loneliest places. The heaths and woods of some districts of Surrey are scarcely more thickly peopled than the fells of Westmoreland; the walker may wander for miles, and still enjoy an untamed primitive earth, guiltless of boundary or furrow, the undisturbed home of all that grows and flies, where the rabbits, the lizards, and the birds live their life as they please, either ignorant of intruding man or strangely little incommoded by his neighborhood. And yet there is nothing forbidding or austere in these wide solitudes. The patches of graceful birch-wood; the miniature lakes nestling among them; the brakes of ling–pink, faintly scented, a feast for every sense; the stretches of purple heather, glowing into scarlet under the touch of the sun; the scattered farmhouses, so mellow in color, so pleasant in outline; the general softness and lavishness of the earth and all it bears, make these Surrey commons not a wilderness but a paradise. Nature, indeed, here is like some spoilt, petulant child. She will bring forth nothing, or almost nothing, for man’s grosser needs. Ask her to bear corn or pasture flocks and she will be miserly and grudging. But ask her only to be beautiful, enticing, capriciously lovely, and she will throw herself into the task with all the abandonment, all the energy, that heart could wish.

It is on the borders of one of the wilder districts of a county, which is throughout a strange mixture of suburbanism and the desert, that we next meet with Robert and Catherine ELsmere. The rectory of Murewell occupied the highest point of a gentle swell of ground which sloped through cornfields and woods to a plain of boundless heather on the south, and climbed away on the north toward the long chalk ridge of the Hog’s Back. It was a square white house pretending neither to beauty nor state, a little awkwardly and barely placed, with only a small stretch of grass and a low hedge between it and the road. A few tall firs climbing above the roof gave a little grace and clothing to its southern side, and behind it there was a garden sloping softly down toward the village at its foot–a garden chiefly noticeable for its grass walks, the luxuriance of the fruit trees clinging to its old red wars, and the masses of pink and white phloxes which now in August gave it the floweriness and the gayety of an Elizabethan song. Below in the hollow and to the right lay the picturesque medley of the village-roofs and gables and chimneys, yellow-gray thatch, shining whitewash, and mellowed brick, making a bright patchwork among the softening trees, thin wreaths of blue smoke, like airy ribbons, tangled through it all. Rising over the rest was a house of some dignity. It had been an old manor-house, now it was half ruinous and the village inn. Some generations back the squire of the clay had dismantled it, jealous that so big a house should exist in the same parish as the Hall, and the spoils of it had furnished the rectory: so that the homely house was fitted inside with mahogany doors and carved cupboard fronts, in which Robert delighted, and in which even Catherine felt a proprietary pleasure.

Altogether a quiet, English spot. If the house had no beauty, it commanded a world of loveliness. All around it–north, south, and west–there spread, as it were, a vast playground of heather and wood and grassy common, in which the few work-a-day patches of hedge and ploughed land seemed engulphed and lost. Close under the rectory windows, however, was a vast sloping cornfield, belonging to the glebe, the largest and fruitfulest of the neighborhood. At the present moment it was just ready for the reaper–the golden ears had clearly but a few more days or hours to ripple in the sun. It was bounded by a dark summer-scorched belt of wood, and beyond, over the distance, rose a blue pointed bill, which seemed to be